T.X. Watson's Blog-shaped Thing

I went back to that room with the whiteboard on Saturday, and I started a new thing I'm trying: Planning in advance literally every minute of every day for the next six weeks.

Okay, that's not exactly what this is. But I'm taking a page out of CGP Grey's podcast and trying a new approach for my calendar. Instead of only including things that are very definitely actually what's happening, I'm planning my ideal schedule -- what my planning-self thinks would be the best use of my time -- so that whenever I look at my calendar, I can see what I thought I'd be doing at that moment.

It's wrapped around my existing schedule, but I've also included things like:

a solid 12 hours a week for homework and 21 hours a week for reading, which my class commitments approach in the amount of time I could spend on them;

blocks of time (mostly early mornings) set aside for catching up on TV shows or podcasts, because sometimes I feel like I want to squeeze those in and I'm hoping setting aside blocks for it will reduce the degree to which I use them to procrastinate;

Chunks of "unstructured time," so when I look at my calendar I don't have to wonder whether this blank spot was supposed to be empty, or if it's somewhere I forgot to put down an event;

meals, which correspond to where I'm going to be, when the dining hall is going to be open, and what I'll need to do to prepare for them;

time to catch up on my chores, because I just emptied my bedroom trash barrel for the first time in the semester;

and more.

Here's a clip of what it looks like on my Google calendar:

These are set up to repeat until the end of the semester, at which point I'll re-evaluate and see if I think this is a good idea or not. And if it turns out to be a really, incredibly bad idea, I can always turn off each calendar individually.